ABSTRACT

Wikipedia claims to be “currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet” (WPEN online a). Indeed, as Alexa's page ranking, search engines’ hit lists and the frequency of quotations from Wikipedia show (cf. below), Wikipedia is rapidly becoming an immensely important source of information for people unfamiliar with a (religious) topic and thus increasingly authoritative in shaping their images of these topics. Wikipedia is no doubt at present one of the most influential and authoritative players on the Internet as an information technology. It is often the first source people turn to, thus the explanations it provides are formative, that is, frequently uncontested by pre-existing perceptions and influential for the reception of sources approached afterwards. This is especially true for topics such as elements of folk religion, which lack an alternative authoritative voice or where too many possibly authoritative voices create diffused alternative images. Shamanism is such a topic and hence this chapter discusses how shamanism, as an example of a contested and unstructured religious phenomenon, is constructed and presented in the Japanese Wikipedia.